Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to techniques for selecting advertisements in a sponsored search environment.
Background
Addressing the information needs of users has been one of the main goals of web search engines since their early days. Web search engines can provide fast and accurate results to user queries, usually for free. However, in order to provide this searching service free of charge, providers of search engines, such as Yahoo! Search™ (at http://www.yahoo.com), Ask.com™ (at http://www.ask.com), and Google™ (at http://www.google.com), typically offer advertising opportunities that finance their operating costs. Web search engines may provide advertisements to the users using a variety of techniques, including banner ads, pop-up ads, and sponsored search ads, among others. These advertisements may be provided to the user at various times and can be placed at various locations on a web page. Web search engine providers often get paid from the providers of the advertisements per user selection of each advertisement, e.g., per user click. Therefore it is beneficial for the web search engine providers to maximize the use of, and thus the profit obtained from, each advertisement shown to the user.
Sponsored search advertisements (“sponsored search ads”) are advertisements that are selected based on received search queries received from users, and are placed on web pages that contain search results to the queries. Sponsored search ads are typically ranked by an advertisement selection system according to how well the features of the query (e.g., keywords of the query) match advertisements (e.g., match bid keywords associated with advertisements). The advertisements that best match the query features may be selected for display in response to the query. In some advanced advertisement selection systems, a quality score is calculated for each advertisement that corresponds to a relevancy of the advertisement to the search query. In such a system, advertisements are selected for placement on the search results web page by choosing the advertisements that have quality scores higher than a pre-determined threshold quality score.
However, such advanced advertisement selection systems typically use a universal pre-determined threshold quality score for all queries, which is not capable of taking into account different types of queries.